Home and field office staff disagreement often impedes international development NGOs (INGOs) from making their accountability systems more responsive to partner and community concerns. Drawing on a staff survey, and qualitative interviews across four country programmes, of a major INGO, three...

As the work of the UN Special Representative (UNSR) for business and human rights moves towards its conclusion in mid-2011, the ‘responsibility to respect' principles have received widespread endorsement from businesses, NGOs and governments. The corporate responsibility to respect is based on...

The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been compared to other historical moments during which significant shifts in regimes of market governance have occurred. Here, we engage with the pieces that follow in this special section of Politics & Society as we consider three dimensions...

For many people throughout the world, the ideal of democracy is now accepted – at least in principle – as the pre-eminent source of political authority and legitimacy. Accordingly, as global-level systems of power, interconnection and organized political governance have expanded in recent...

There is a rising sense within contemporary global politics that the advance of those processes of global interconnectedness that we bluntly refer to as globalisation brings with it increasing problems of injustice on a global scale, in the form of entrenched poverty, social exclusion and the...

Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a...

The global justice movement has often been associated with opposition to the broad programme of ‘neoliberalism' and associated patterns of ‘corporate globalisation', creating a widespread impression that this movement is opposed to liberalism more broadly conceived. Our goal in this article...

This paper reviews a range of initiatives that attempt to transform the global institutional arrangements through which production and trade of coffee is organised and governed. Specifically, it examines the Fair Trade system, Starbucks' CAFÉ Practices Program, and a range of wider campaigning...

In recent years, one of the central claims promoted by critics of “globalization” has been that the existing system of global economic governance is being undermined by the emergence of “accountability deficits.” According to this widespread view, the expanding power of multinational...

Around the world peoples' lives are affected by the actions of businesses. In addition to positive impacts on livelihoods, ideas or technologies, business activities are also sometimes associated with significant human rights abuses – for example through land dispossession and forced...